HK jury warning in banker murder trial
Print Edition
A Hong Kong judge ordered the jury in British banker Rurik Jutting’s double murder trial not to allow its verdict to be influenced by “passion or disgust” over the torture, rape and killings, but to weigh the evidence intellectually.
Jutting has pled not guilty to murdering two Indonesian women in his Hong Kong apartment in 2014 on grounds of diminished responsibility due to alcohol and drug abuse and sexual disorders. He has admitted manslaughter.
The jury of four women and five men is due to start considering its verdict tomorrow. Murder carries a mandatory life sentence, while the lesser charge of manslaughter carries a maximum of life.
Jutting, a former vice president at Bank of America Corp, is charged with murdering Sumarti Ningsih, 23, and Seneng Mujiasih, 26, in his apartment.
The trial, in its third week, has attracted global attention due to the 31-year-old Cambridge graduate’s profile and the brutal nature of the killings in a city where serious crime is rare.
The jury has viewed graphic video taken by Jutting on his smartphone of him torturing Ningsih before he cut her throat. Her mutilated body was found in a suitcase on the balcony, while Mujiasih’s was found inside the apartment with wounds to her neck and buttocks.
He has not faced separate charges connected to the rape and torture.
Deputy High Court Judge Michael Stuart-Moore told the jury to consider whether Jutting was of “abnormal mind” at the time of the killings that diminished his responsibility.
The jury should approach its verdict intellectually, rather than be “colored by passion or disgust that you feel at the dreadful acts which the defendant has admitted he carried out,” said Stuart-Moore.
The defense said Jutting suffered from cocaine and alcohol abuse and personality disorders of sexual sadism and narcissism that had impaired his ability to control his behavior.
Stuart-Moore, speaking in a packed courtroom, said the fact that Jutting had not testified himself during the trial did not prove one thing or another.
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